Tobacco companies to be billed for cleaning up cigarette butts in Spain | Hacker News Reader

Tobacco companies to be billed for cleaning up cigarette butts in Spain

theguardian.com

30 pointsacqbu18 comments

I like this, in the sense that you're paying for more closed-loop usage. Look at e-waste or tire recycling fees. It makes sense to be responsible for the whole lifecycle—the end of an item's life is not necessarily "free" when you're done with it.

Sadly, that's likely not what's happening here—these butts probably all going to hit the landfill rather than have any usable recyclable life afterward. So really it's just ensuring they don't cause local pollution.

It might incentivize cigarette companies to make biodegradeable butts, something they should have been forced to do decades ago.

I wonder how many butts can fit in an economic postal envelope (like a US flat-rate box) to Catlan? For .20 each, that's not too bad.

according to: http://www.longwood.edu/cleanva/cigbutthowmany.htm

10,000 butts weight 3.75lbs and have volume of 5L - would be worth 2000? That's pretty good.

Aggressive enforcement of littering laws seems like it would be a lot simpler and more straightforward.

I don't imagine they have this problem in Singapore.

What happened to assigning responsibility to the responsible party?

>What happened to assigning responsibility to the responsible party?

I think this is a good example of exactly that. Just because someone is at the end of a causal chain does not make them solely responsible. That's why in tort law, damages are often apportioned among defendants. Presumably, Spain already extracts fines for littering from the end user, this is just adding some liability to another culprit in the causal chain.

I kind of doubt that the heavy fines have as much to do with Singapore's lack of littering as their overall culture. More holistic and less individualistic. Japan has equally low rates of littering, but I don't think their laws are quite as strict.

Cleanup (or aggressive enforcement of anti-littering) costs, so not charging companies for the externalities they generate is almost like a taxpayer subsidy for them.

I know that everyone hates tobacco companies but making them pay for cleaning up after their customers is wrong. Each individual smoker should be held responsible for their actions. What's next? Making McDonald's pay for cleaning up hamburger wrappers or making grocery stores pay for cleaning up shopping bags? Ridiculous

I mean, yeah. Sounds good to me. Let's do that too.

So... Companies should be held responsible for the actions of their customers and the customers shouldn't be held responsible for their own actions?

Why just one or the other?

Well, there are sugar taxes because sugary drinks and foodstuffs are very unhealthy for the general populous and we can't help but be addicted to them, so, if it becomes a big enough of a problem, yes?

> but making them pay for cleaning up after their customers is wrong

Well, they would pass the extra cost to their customers anyway. Indirectly, the smokers would pay.

The use of disposable bags and plastic packaging is a choice that companies responsible for our food supply chain makes.

Tobacco companies addict their customers with cigarettes, which cause a public health issue and impact all of us one way or another.

Even if they aren't responsible, we should be looking at public policies that are effective.

Were you doing satire? Let me know and I'll un-downvote you.

Apparently HN is very opposed to the idea of personal responsibility, judging from the response. Just because you don't like a company doesn't mean you can hold them responsible for the actions of others. We're talking about littering here, not the act of smoking itself. The tobacco companies didn't force them to litter, that was a choice they made as individuals.

I suspect this is due to a difference in ideology.

American ideology seems seems to be stuck in enlightenment ideas when it comes to philosophy of mind, which is likely due to the veneration of the founders and political system, which is based on Cartesian dualism.

Religious Americans are more likely to believe that there is such a thing as free will and people could have made a different choice, while atheist Europeans tend more towards eliminative materialism, where there is no magical soul that makes unbiased decisions, and folk psychology (concepts like beliefs and wants) are merely inadequate descriptions of behavioral patterns or post-hoc rationalizations.

An American would likely view a murderer wholly responsible of a gun murder. No fault could be ascribed to the gun manufacturer, legislation, or any other external factor. Retributive justice calls for the death penalty.

A European would be slightly more likely to see the murder as a chain of events in a deterministic world, without agency. Assuming the European wants to decrease murders for some reason, they would advocate rehabilitative justice, meaning a short sentence mainly there to prevent future murders and preventative measures all the way up the chain of events, such as reducing guns and increasing psychotherapy.

You don't need to be religious to believe in free will (in fact many religious zealots throughout history have said the opposite), in my opinion it is self-evident. When judging the actions of any individual you should of course take into account environmental factors, but to ascribe all actions to them wholly and reduce the individual to a deterministic automaton is not a well-balanced view, and personally I find it dehumanizing and cynical. I'd rather be 'stuck' in the 'folk psychology' of personal responsibility and free will than progress into the fatalistic materialism of these Europeans you speak of, sounds like they've got a sophistry problem over there

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